Big Summer Read online

  I added the appropriate hashtags—#showus and #plussizebeauty and #celebratemysize, #plussizestyle and #effyourbeautystandards and—my favorite—#mybodyisnotanapology. I tagged the brands that had made the foundation on my face, the liner on my eyelids, and the berry stain on my lips, as well as my tunic, my leggings, and my shoes, and tried not to feel guilty, knowing that I was leaning into the “thriving” and “beautiful” more than the “messy” and “busy.” Tomorrow, I promised myself. Tomorrow I’d post something a little more honest—a workout picture with my makeup-less face, or an unfiltered shot of my legs in yoga pants. I grabbed a picture of Bingo jumping for another Yum-Yum and posted it on her Instagram page, and padded into the living room that Darshi and I had furnished with Craigslist finds and parental cast-offs—an old couch that my parents were getting rid of; a glass coffee table from the Shahs. Together, my mother and I had papered one of the living room walls with squares of scrapbooking paper, putting together a pattern of glittery golds and pale greens, and I’d decoupaged inexpensive trays from Ikea with scraps of old wallpaper and wrapping paper. The wooden jharoka that Darshi’s grandmother had given to her as a housewarming gift had pride of place on the south-facing wall—“A wedding gift! From Rajasthan!” Darshi’s Nani ma said, nodding proudly as Darshi’s brother and father had wrestled the heavy carved piece into place. In the kitchen, the pressure cooker Darshi’s mother had bought for us sat next to the toaster oven. “You’ll make idli,” Dr. Shah had said, nodding as if this was a given, and Darshi had nodded back, smiling, waiting for her mother to turn around before mouthing the words “I won’t.” My craft table stood against the far living room wall, piled with plywood boxes in various stage of completion, the ones I called memory boxes. I customized them with photographs, old postcards, wallpaper or wrapping paper or pictures from vintage children’s books, and sent them to customers on Etsy, who would pay up to a hundred dollars for a unique and personal gift.

  “How’s the littlest Snitzer?” Darshi asked as I sat down on the couch with Bingo beside me. Darshi’s braces had come off in eighth grade, and she’d swapped her glasses for contacts the following year. She still had her curls, but now they were an orderly tumble, glossed with argan oil and falling halfway down her back. She was still petite, but her narrow hips were now curvy and her chest was no longer flat. In college, Darshi had come out as bisexual, but only to her closest friends and her older brother. For the past six months, she’d been dating a woman named Carmen, whom she’d met at a dance sponsored by Columbia’s gay-straight alliance, but she hadn’t yet told her parents about Carmen, or about her sexual identity. Her plan was to finish her dissertation first. “That way, it’ll balance,” she’d said, using her hands to mime a scale. “Girlfriend on one side, doctor on the other.”

  I’d told her that I thought her parents would be fine, that they loved her and would be happy that she’d found someone with whom she could build a life. Darshi had just snorted. “It’s cute that you think that,” she’d said.

  In the living room, I gave Bingo’s ears a scratch. “Ian’s fine. And guess what? I got the job with Leef!”

  “Congratulations!” she said. “Now show me the clothes!”

  I went back to my bedroom and put on the Jane dress, then the Pamela pants, then the Kesha blouse with the Nidia blazer, and, finally, the swimsuit, the Darcy. I twirled and posed as Darshi clapped and cheered, and took a few pictures for use once the campaign began. Most of the influencers I knew had partners—husbands or guys who referred to themselves, unironically, as Instagram boyfriends, and who’d obligingly interrupt date night or a picnic in the park to snap shots of six different outfits. I had my tripod, my mom, and Darshi.

  Once I’d rehung everything and zipped it all back into the garment bag, I put on my favorite pajamas, wine-colored silk in a paisley pattern. I’d found them in a secondhand store on the Upper East Side and imagined they’d once belonged to some elderly male Wall Street potentate, who’d worn them to sip whiskey and puff a cigar, after a long day of exploiting the proletariat. In the living room, Darshi, in blue sweatpants and a Lathrop School sweatshirt, poured us both glasses of wine. “To Daphne. May this be the first of many wonderful things.” We drank, and when the food arrived, we filled our plates, and we watched All the Single Ladies. Or, rather, Darshi watched, hooting and scoffing, and I kept my eyes on the screen, half of my attention on the machinations of the women as they attempted to win the favor of a handsome bachelor named Kyle; the other half on how I was going to tell Darshi my news.

  * * *

  By the third week of sixth grade, Darshi and I had settled into a comfortable friendship. Most days, I sat with her and her friends at lunch, and we’d spend time together outside of school, browsing for clothes at the Housing Works thrift shop or hanging out in the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Sixth Street. We both liked to read, although I loved mysteries and romance, and Darshi adored horror and true crime. Darshi lived with her parents and two brothers in a two-story, four-bedroom brick house in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens that had a yard and a two-car garage. I’d spent the night there, and she’d slept over my house, too. Darshi and I got along, but Darshi knew that she would always be Drue Cavanaugh’s runner-up, that once or twice a week Drue would call out “Daphne! Come sit with me!” and I would go without a backward glance. I knew that Drue wasn’t a good friend and that I should have let go of the idea of being part of Drue’s crowd, but I couldn’t make myself do it.

  All through sixth grade and into middle school and beyond, I was Darshi’s friend, but I was Drue’s creature. I became a regular guest at the Cavanaughs’ apartment on the Upper East Side, which had floor-to-ceiling windows that gave panoramic views of the city, the Hudson River, and Central Park. I met Abigay, the Cavanaughs’ cook, who had freckled cheeks and a gap between her front teeth that you could see when she spoke or when she smiled, and could make any dish you could think of. “What’s your pleasure, my ladies?” she would ask, in her singsong Jamaican accent, when Drue and I came into the kitchen (Drue would dump her bags by the door, a move that would have gotten me a lecture had I attempted it at my house). The first time I’d heard that request, I’d asked for apples and peanut butter. Drue had taken her hair out of its bun, then gathered it up again. “How about gougères?” she’d asked. Abigay had pursed her full lips and given a nod. Soon, the house smelled of buttery, cheesy baking dough. “What are gougères?” I’d asked Drue, and she’d shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I just read about them in a book.”

  In return for this largesse, for the invitations and the snacks and the chance to sit with Drue at lunch, I would pass messages to Drue’s crushes and break up with them when she was through; I kept watch when Drue shoplifted at Saks and Barneys, and I wrote English papers after Drue would narrate for me a general idea about what she wanted to say, usually lying sprawled on her bed, staring up at her ceiling. And every time, after a few days’ worth of attention, Drue would ignore me, looking right through me, as if I had ceased to exist.

  I hadn’t yet heard the word “gaslighting,” but I knew that Drue made me feel like I was crazy, like I couldn’t trust my own ears or eyes. I also knew that, by every available metric, I belonged with Darshi, and Frankie Fogelson, David Johnson, and Joon Woo Pak. The smart kids, the dreamy, artsy ones, the misfits, the geeks. They were generous, loyal, and kind. But none of them was as alluring, as interesting, or as much fun as Drue. She made me angry and resentful, and she made me doubt myself and even, sometimes, hate myself, but she also made every day that I was with her an adventure. For every time that Drue cold-shouldered me, ignoring me in class or in the lunchroom, there’d be a day when she’d grab me as I walked into homeroom, voice urgent as she whispered the details of her night or her weekend into my ear, asking for help, for advice, needing to know how she should deal with the two boys who both liked her, needing me to read over her history homework. Needing me.

  One Saturday night she surprised me. �
�Hey, can I do one of these eating adventure things with you and your dad?”

  I squirmed. I’d felt silly, telling Drue about our adventures: how my father and I would read the papers and the food blogs and the magazines, looking for something we’d never tried. Our roamings had taken us to all five boroughs, where we had sampled tamales, sticky rice in lotus leaves, Burmese tofu, Filipino fried chicken, Russian draniki, Polish pierogis, Georgian khinkali, and tonton dumplings filled with chopped and seasoned pigs’ feet. I’d eaten roast goat, chicken feet, suckling pig, soup dumplings and dan dan noodles, fermented duck eggs, alligator and grilled kangaroo, durian, purple yams and jackfruit.

  The rule was, we’d try a new place every Sunday. My father would choose the restaurant. It was my job to plan our transportation, to read up on the country or region we’d be sampling, and to locate a bookstore or library or coffee shop near the restaurant, where we could sit and read after our meal, and maybe have dessert.

  Darshi had joined us a few times, and had even steered us toward her family’s favorite spots in Jackson Heights, but I’d felt silly telling Drue about our Sundays, knowing how childish it probably sounded—an afternoon with Daddy!—to a girl who’d smoked pot in eighth grade and lost her virginity in ninth. But Drue had listened, her expression thoughtful and sincere. She’d asked me questions—What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? What did you like the best? And it’s just you and your father, all day long?

  I’d told her that she was welcome to join us, with no hope that she ever would. But that chilly, sunny October morning, she buzzed our door bright and early. Her face was shining between her pink cashmere scarf and her pink pom-pom hat. “So what’s the plan?”

  Instead of trying a new place, my dad and I had agreed to break our own rules and take Drue to an old favorite, a place with an exotic cuisine that wasn’t so challenging or unfamiliar that she’d leave hungry. We took the E train out to Jackson Heights and walked along streets filled with signs in Spanish and Punjabi, advertising DVDs and phone cards, eyebrow threading and spirit baths, until we reached the Himalayan Yak on Roosevelt Avenue. The walls were draped with prayer flags and carved wooden panels, and every table was full. I knew that Drue wasn’t used to waiting, or to restaurants that didn’t take reservations, but she was patient and quiet, standing beside me until we were seated, and a waitress with a glossy dark ponytail came to fill our water glasses. My dad gave her a brief bow and a murmured “Namaste.”

  “He does that everywhere,” I whispered to Drue, feeling a combination of embarrassment and pride. I thought that she would think it was corny, how my father tried to learn how to give a polite greeting in the language of whatever nation or region had supplied the day’s cuisine. “It’s respectful,” he’d told me.

  “My father says everyone in America should speak English,” Drue said, a little sheepishly. Of all the many times I’d heard Drue invoke her father, this was the first where she’d ever sounded anything but proud.

  “He’s certainly not the only one who feels that way,” my father said mildly. “Personally, I think it’s respectful.” I saw Drue’s eyes get wide as she noticed the entry for goat bhutan, which was a dish of stir-fried goat intestines, liver, heart, and kidneys, served with green chilies, onions, tomatoes, and herbs.

  My dad ordered pork dumplings called momo, deep-fried red snapper, sautéed bok choy, yak sausage, goat thali, garlic naan, and for dessert, a kind of thick rice pudding called kheer. Drue looked around, wide-eyed, first at the diners, then at the food. I was worried she wouldn’t eat anything—by then, I’d heard her and Ainsley and Avery whispering and giggling about the lentils Darshi sometimes brought for lunch, saying that Indian food all looked like baby poop, but Drue surprised me, gamely tasting everything, even the yak, while my father regaled us with stories of students from years gone by—the girl who’d printed a final paper right from the web and hadn’t even bothered to erase the Internet Professor logo, the boy who believed that one should dress in inverse proportion to how much one had studied, and arrived for his final in a rented tuxedo and tails.

  After we’d stuffed ourselves, we packed up the leftovers and took the G train to Brooklyn. I knew, but maybe Drue didn’t, that the G was the only train that didn’t go to Manhattan. That afternoon, it was filled with mostly nonwhite passengers, with a smattering of hipsters and the occasional elderly Polish woman. I noticed her staring, but if she had thoughts, she didn’t share them with me.

  We went to Sahadi’s, my father’s favorite Middle Eastern shop on Atlantic Avenue. Drue and I wandered along the rows of knee-high glass jars containing every variety of nuts—pistachios and peanuts and almonds and cashews, roasted and salted or unsalted, shelled or unshelled. At the counter, the customers took numbers, and a preternaturally calm Middle Eastern man with a neat mustache took their orders, while a pair of women scooped hummus and baba ghanoush and kibbe balls into plastic containers. Drue even ordered a half pound of pumpkin seeds and murmured her thanks when my father said, “My treat.” After we’d paid, we carried out bags to a restaurant called Tripoli, where we sat, drinking tea and eating slices of sticky, honey-drenched baklava. My father did the Sunday crossword puzzle, I read an Agatha Christie mystery, and Drue, who’d come prepared, paged through the current issue of Vogue. When it was time to go, Drue politely declined another subway trip, using her cell phone to call her father’s car service instead.

  “Want to take anything home?” I asked, swinging the bags of Tibetan leftovers at her.

  She gave me a rueful smile. “I can’t even imagine what my mom would do if she found something deep-fried in our refrigerator. My parents…” She looked like she was going to say more, but just then a Town Car came around the corner and pulled up at the curb.

  Drue opened the door, then surprised me by hugging me hard. “This was the best day of my life,” she said. Before I could respond, or confirm that she was kidding, she closed the door, and the car drove off, leaving me holding bags of Tibetan leftovers, feeling unsettled and sad.

  At home, my father unpacked in the kitchen, rearranging the leftover Swedish meatballs and the braised short ribs he’d made during the week to make room for the dips and the kibbe balls.

  “I’m glad Drue got to come.” My father’s head was buried in the refrigerator. I couldn’t see his expression as he said, “I think she was hungry.”

  As if, I thought. “They have a chef who makes them anything they want.”

  “So you’ve mentioned.” My father closed the refrigerator, wiped his hands on a dish towel, and began straightening the sections of the New York Times on the kitchen table. I went to my bedroom to work on the watercolor I’d been painting for my mother’s birthday and to think about my friend and how there were things you could be hungry for besides food.

  I knew that on Monday there was every chance she would ignore me. It wouldn’t matter. I would still want to be her friend, because she was everything I wanted to be. She was beautiful, and funny, and glamorous; a long, unfurled ribbon of cool, where I was a sweaty pretzeled knot of striving. I wanted her to be my friend, I wanted her to tell me her secrets; I wanted to be pretty by association, if not in real life. I wanted her intermittent kindness, and as much of her company as she’d give me. I wanted to be just like her, and, if I couldn’t, I at least wanted to be by her side. Whatever she needed from me, I would give her. Whatever she needed done, I would do.

  * * *

  When our show was over, Darshi packed up the leftovers. I washed the dishes and took Bingo out for her last walk of the night, opening Instagram and tapping like like like like on dozens of comments while she peed. The how can I be brave like you question was still waiting, and I still wasn’t any closer to an answer. It’s easier for white women, I thought, trudging back upstairs, thinking that, no matter what people believed my body told them, at least it wasn’t compounded by preconceptions about what the color of my skin might suggest.

  I found Darshi in the kitch
en, a mug of chai in her hands. She’d taken out her contacts and put on her glasses, big, round-framed ones that I thought were relics from middle school. The longer I procrastinated, the harder it would be to tell the truth, and the more grounds Darshi would have to accuse me of trying to hide it from her. And so I said, “Hey, so listen.”

  Darshi tilted her head. I breathed deeply and, on a single exhalation, said, “Drue Cavanaugh came to the Snitzers’ place last week. She apologized to me. She’s getting married in June, and she asked me to be one of her bridesmaids. And I told her that I’d do it.”

  For a long moment, Darshi just stared. “I can’t believe you,” she finally said.

  My heart sank. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be easy. “She’s desperate,” I said.

  “I can imagine.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends.”

  Darshi snorted. “You’re telling me there aren’t college versions of us? Some other girls she used up and threw away?”

  I said, “There probably are. Although Drue says she’s been in therapy.”

  That earned another snort, with a side of eye roll.

  “She’s really desperate. She offered to pay me.”

  Darshi set down her mug and crossed her arms over her chest. “Now I actually am surprised.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the Cavanaugh Corporation’s in trouble.” She stalked, stiff-legged, to her shoulder bag, yanked out her phone, and pulled up an article from Bloomberg News. Cavanaugh Corp Looks to Offload Troubled Fifth Avenue Flagship. I skimmed the story, reading out loud.